prewett

I guess I'm not impressed that some totally different alloy is stronger than steel. You can't change both method and alloy and claim that the method is better. Presumably the paper compared the same alloy using the normal and the new method, but this article omitted that essential information, and in so doing destroyed the result.

It's in the beginning of the Prose Edda. It's part a genre one could call "universal history", which is tying your group's history into the narrative of the world. It was pretty common in medieval Christianity; I'm not sure if places like Japan or Vietnam tried to tie themselves into Chinese mythic history. It makes some things like the Book of Invasions (Irish) make more sense, because historically Ireland being invaded from Spain en route from somewhere in the Mediterranean seems really unlikely. But if you're going to tie yourself into the biblical narrative, you've got to somehow get yourselves from the Mediterranean to wherever you live. In the case of the Icelanders (the Eddas), the way this was accomplished was to say that Odin et al were not gods but came from Troy, with a stop somewhere in-between (if I recall correctly), and over time came to be worshipped as gods.

Spending is also a noun. A gerund used to be the way you nounify a verb. “Ad spending” is perfectly grammatical, unlike “ad spend”.

This seems to be part of a broader trend, not just business. One group of pastor-students would talk about giving a “preach”. Drove me nuts.

I think it is used sort of the same way that fundamentalist Christians take the Bible "literally", as in, there's just the literal meaning of the words, no deeper symbolic meaning, usage of literary themes, allusions, etc. Fundamentalism also has a similar aversion to nuance. If you conceive of much of the world as driven by tensions between two opposites, fundamentalism chops off one of the ends. So for example, you have a tension between a subjective meaning (symbols, themes, allusions, etc.) and the objective meaning ("literal" meaning). As the late Rabbi Sacks observed, often the subjective meaning of the text runs counter to the objective meaning, and that counter- tension results in much deeper meanings than either alone.

I think he is observing that we live in a fundamentalist age. By "fundamentalist" I mean "there's one right answer", that is, no nuance. Even on the political Left, where you normally find some nuance, you get a fundamentalism that requires interpreting everything through an oppressor/victim lens that assigns groups to one or the other. So Palestinians are "victim", despite the fact that the Muslim view of homosexuality would be categorized "oppressive". White people are "oppressor" because they enslaved people, despite the fact that young white men died by the hundreds of thousands in a war to end slavery, and that the British Empire ended slavery in the Ottoman Empire by refusing to trade with them if they continued slavery.

Who's defrauding poor people? The risk/reward is much better for defrauding rich people...

Landlords of Adam Smith's England and what "landlord" means in contemporary America are two different things. None of my landlords have charged to use pre-existing natural resources, they charged to use a decidedly non-natural housing structure.

Landlords absolutely create value. One value they create is liquid short-term (yearly, usually) housing. Another value they create is dense housing in desirable areas (such as downtown housing complexes), although landlords are not the only way to do this. They also create smaller housing than single-family homes, and maintenance-free living (again, not the only way to do this).

Now, whether what they charge is commensurate with the value they provide is a different question. My experience with private landlords has been positive and with commercial landlords has been grossly overpriced, lousy construction, and noisy. In my area commercial landlords are priced close to a mortgage, so they are a terrible value unless you are definitely short-term.

(Also, I don't think Xi Jinping popped the real-estate bubble quietly... He was pretty public with your statement, but it was a debt crisis that popped the bubble. It was not quiet at the time, and secondary effects lead to several locally-large protests.)

I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa, too.

But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)

I'm American, but I've said "washroom" for a long time because I'm not asking to take a bash, but at least I wash at some point afterwards. Most people seem to understand fine, but I do get a few now and then.

Funny story, I was visiting Hong Kong one time, and asked the young waiter, who seemed to speak English just fine, where the washroom was. Blank stare. Bathroom? Cesuo (Mandarin)? All blank stares. I was a little out of options at that point... Turned out the word I was looking for was "toilet", which is a word I never use.

Maybe you just didn't really see it. I've begun to notice that I don't even see certain things that I read, especially if I'm not intellectually prepared to receive them. I vaguely remembered the mice and the earth being a computer (once prompted by the post), but I had no idea about the mice being 3D projections of a multi-dimensional being. I'm pretty sure that idea was either not something I truly comprehended at 20 and/or I thought it was stupid/random (my opinion on the book as a whole), so the thought never even sank in.

Other times I just don't see something for other reasons. I read Augustine's Confessions and never saw the famous line "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee", which is in the THIRD sentence! I'm not sure if the antiquated English [1] threw me off, or what. In fact, I don't remember seeing pretty much every quote people take from Confessions, besides the pear episode. Some of those are theological ideas that are just completely new, some are probably my annoyance at his "confessing" things that aren't really faults [2], and my annoyance at his insistence on quoting the Bible everywhere he could [3]. But I find it strange that I seemed to have simply not seen most of what other people get out of it.

[1] Rant: don't bother reading the out of copyright translations of ancient works, because the 1800s and early 1900s seemed to think that because the works are old, it should be translated into old English. This is stupid. Augustine didn't write in 500 year old Latin, so translating it into 500 year old English is mistranslation.

[2] I am starting to think that maybe "confess" might have meant something different, and it is not confessing a faults but a statement of beliefs.

[3] I suspect that ancient ideas of rhetoric valued quoting trusted sources a lot, kind of how classical Chinese literature quotes older classic literature a lot. Augustine, being a professional rhetorician, would in that case be expected to do that. But it drove me nuts.

This sort of thing makes me think that if I were engineering a biome, this sort of specialized spider would be exactly how I would solve the problem of a species that I accidentally made too prolific. The spider is a targeted fix: only preys on the ants, and if the ant problem ever resolves itself, the spider goes away.

I think this is a case where the theory of evolution feels pretty handy-wavy and doesn't answer the mechanism of how this happens. The article even talks about "bioengineered" silk! There are certainly lots of cases of evolution, so it is clear that things do evolve, but the problems of a theory are revealed in the edge cases, and I think this spider suggests that the theory really needs a lot of work to be a robust theory. I don't think a simple gradient descent (evolving toward more fitness) has explanatory power in this case. A theory that hand-waved around edge cases like this would never fly in Physics; at best it would be considered a holding theory until a better one could be found, like dark matter.

(Plus, I think it's fun to think about bioengineering in a sci-fi, or even Babylon 5 way)

I'm confused about the quote, because the numbers do not add up to me. Elsewhere in the discussion SV apartments are quoted at $3500/month. When I rent, utilities tend to be under $100, and groceries are about $400. Let's be generous and say "utilities and groceries" are $1000. So "rent, utilities and groceries" are $4500/month, at total federal + CA state tax rate of 40% (estimating high), that means $90k/year to break even. I'm not sure what Ms. Gan filtered via the reporter thinks "consum[ing] nearly everything that comes in" means, but lets say 80% of income that's $112k, although that would still be a $20k/yr surplus (and a 5 month cushion). So there's quite a lot of room "earning below $200,000" and financial distress. If the article meant "less than $100k" I could believe it. Or perhaps Ms. Gan's friends' "rent, utilities and groceries" comprises more things than it literally means?

It doesn't even do that. If there's complete collapse, there won't be a reliable network to transact over, and not reliable electricity to run the network and do the processing.

you will eventually hit a point where you start thinking it's all meaningless ... You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative

I hit that point after about 5 years. At the time, software development was mostly desktop applications (which are sadly defunct), and UI frequently doesn't require much in the way of algorithms. Then I focused on the challenge of design a UI that matches the user's mental model, which lasted about five years. After another a stint in mobile games and apps, I started doing contracting. The key for me was the concept of serving someone else' vision (instead of my own vision of FIRE), and some HN conversation on some of Steve Job's videos on work. This all boiled down into an attitude of "I will solve your problem (and you will pay me)" (from Job's discussion with the guy who designed the NeXT logo).

As a contractor, sometimes I solve your problem with a cool algorithm, sometimes by simply implementing your pixel-perfect design, and sometimes with a true-Agile back-and-forth of vague design into concrete software. Since I switching to the "I solve your problem" perspective, I haven't had any problems with feeling frustrated at just being a code monkey implementing stuff I don't need to think about. (However, I have discovered that I get really bored doing server stuff, and it doesn't save me from that. I just like something concrete, and not having to debug by putting in print statements and wading through thousands of lines of output, with only the reward that the variable contents is now correct. Turns out I want to see something. I get unreasonably excited about going from a blank screen and slowly populating it with widgets.)

Dividends are also one way of income in retirement, much more predictably than selling stock. The yields are worse than bonds, but they can be considered to be mostly to rise with inflation, albeit on a year or two delay. Dividends also act as a discipline to keep management focused on the business, since you need to pay real money to shareholders, instead of just doing whatever good idea you have, regardless of whether it is a net benefit to the company.

GOOG and META are listed on the Nasdaq, as far as I know, hence the four letter ticker, so maybe NYSE still has a mono-class requirement. That's something worth knowing, I avoid investing in companies where my stock isn't the same as everyone else's.

This is a great use for AI! Calculating intersections is tedious and there are an surprising number of edge cases that are tedious to track down and fix.

You've been at your current career for 20 years, and you have at least 24 left, so it seems like there's plenty of time for a new career. Even 10 years would be a worthwhile second career. I even met someone who went to seminary around 58, worked as a pastor for 5 years, then retired (and became an Orthodox catechumen right afterwards).

Why short QQQ when SpaceX will only be 2% (according to a poster above), when many of the other companies in the index are tech and chip companies, such as NVDA, which are going gang-busters? Even if SpaceX went bankrupt you'd only see a 2% drop, which is easily covered by all the AI chip companies going up. If you think SpaceX is overvalued, buy options against it directly.

Since you couldn't "put money in the internet", you had to choose some actual companies. Your results varied by which company you chose, and when you invested. (This is always the case, obviously) Sun Microsystems? Let's say you bought the dip at the end of May 2000, at $150. It's ending price when it was bought by Oracle in 2010 was $9.50. [1] Suppose you bought Cisco at the same time for $37.30. You would have waited 18 years, until Aug 2018 for it to reach the same height. Now it's at $127, which over 26 years is an annualized return of 5%. It would have only taken 14 years to break even with Microsoft.

Now, if you had put your money in those stocks 12 months later, you would do okay (except for Sun). So, no, those pensions did not do the right thing by buying at the peak of a bubble. At least, not for people like me who don't like 15 years of negative returns.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/cisco/stock-price-history/

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky.

Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.

It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.

Why wouldn't supernatural beings work through representatives? For one thing, they are presumably only going to work through people that are committed to their (the beings') agenda. And why would supernatural beings necessarily be populist? Until the Christian revolution, the dominant thought was that the supernatural beings were elitist; all of the heroes in Greek mythology were nobility of some form.

Quit reading after it suggested Lotus Notes was a Microsoft product [1], which it wasn't. The last time I used it, about 2002, it had become an IBM product. If the basic facts aren't right, I'm not interested in the conclusions.

[1] "... what made Notes so important to Microsoft ..."

Citing a 100 km bike ride as a counter-example is not very helpful. Sure, technically, the parent was worded as an absolute statement, but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier that it is irrelevant to a discussion about diet. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about relatively normal diets, and clearly biking 100 km is well outside normal.

Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.

Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.

The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)

If the article is about the craft of writing, then no point. But if the article is about communicating ideas, AI is just the means the person with the ideas chose.

However, in this case I think both were fairly vacuous. Also, sentence fragments are a hallmark of bad writing that high school English teachers try to train you out of, apparently unsuccessfully if the training data makes them so likely.

I don't think software was ever sold as a high variance career. Start a startup! was sold that way, particularly by PG's early essays, but not not W2 employment. You do W2 because you want low variance, and you either love software or it pays well. Either way, I don't think most people were okay with terrible outcomes. (I don't think getting laid off is terrible, I think it should be an expected possibility. I've found that contracting/freelance has helped reduce my fear of losing my job, since you expect the job to end when you start it, and since you're regularly looking for a new job, you get a sense of how long it takes.)

Generally you can only profitably expand into adjacent products. Making and selling cars and HVACs are completely different, meaning that your expansion will be starting from zero knowledge. Furthermore, the sales channel of HVACs, sales strategies, etc. is not likely to have much in common with that for cars, so you are essentially creating a whole new startup company. (In the case of HVACs, it would be a startup in a commodity market, which would make no sense, because commodity markets have no real profits.) Doing one thing well is not just Unix philosophy, it is also a sound business strategy. Of course, usually adjacent things that could be done well suggest themselves, but often there is a limit to these.

They also say "Ai" in the upper left, which is suggestive.

I noticed that the astrophysicist has a microscope on her laboratory counter. I doubt she gets the opportunity to use it much in her line of work.

Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obviously didn't hurt innovation, but people got paid in perks and corner offices and status instead of just money.

I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)